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Alice Evans, of Chester, holds a picture of her son Leroy. The family is seeking a new hearing on his murder conviction. He’s been in jail for more than three decades for a murder the family says he did not commit.

Friends, family rally for Chester man they say was wrongly convicted in death of ‘Avon Lady’

Alice Evans, of Chester, holds a picture of her son Leroy. The family is seeking a new hearing on his murder conviction. He’s been in jail for more than three decades for a murder the family says he did not commit.

CHESTER >> Friends and relatives of a man convicted in the 1980 murder of “Avon Lady” Emily Leo staged another rally at City Hall Tuesday afternoon calling for District Attorney Jack Whelan to reopen the investigation into her death.

Leo, a resident of the McCaffery Village public housing project, was a sales representative with Avon and made a house call on the morning of Nov. 11, 1980, to the home of Anthony Tyrone Jones in the 3000 block of West 11th Street.

Jones testified at trial that it was Leroy Evans’ idea to lure Leo into the house under the pretense of buying Avon products. He said Evans choked Leo with a clothesline in the kitchen and beat her about the head with an iron before Jones stuffed her into a trash can and took her to a nearby vacant lot.

A truck driver called police after seeing Jones throwing rocks at Leo’s near-lifeless body. Jones ran off but was arrested later that same day. Leo remained in critical condition at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland until her death three weeks later on Nov. 28.

Jones, who was 17 at the time, made a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty and name his alleged accomplice in order to avoid the death penalty. Jones’ testimony that Evans hatched the plan and carried out the attack was the only thing linking Evans to the murder, according to defense attorney Mike Malloy, though Evans did admit that he later took some bloody clothes from Jones’ room and set them on fire.

“It came back into court by way of a DNA petition and over time the case has begun to become more problematic,” said Malloy at Tuesday’s rally. “There were problems with the evidence, there were problems with the testimony, but the co-defendant … has given a sworn statement, 73 pages, where he’s revealed the entire crime, how he did the crime alone, what he did with the evidence, what he did with the stolen money.”

A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 21 before Delaware County Court of Common Pleas Judge James Bradley requesting a DNA examination of Leo’s fingernails. Malloy said there was an allegation that Leo scratched at Evans during the struggle.

Filing that motion led to additional details about the crime emerging and eventually to Jones recanting his original story, said Malloy.

Malloy said the statement provided by Jones indicates he tore a piece of clothesline from the back of the house to strangle Leo. Police were able to match the two pieces of rope in 1980, according to Malloy, but it never came up at trial.

The crime scene was also devoid of blood, Malloy said, meaning Leo could not have been beaten there. He is hoping DNA evidence will further bolster Jones’ account.

Whelan spokesperson Emily Harris has previously said Jones is not credible, noting he has recanted in the past.

“Evans received a fair trial and the jury properly convicted him,” she said in a prior statement. “He is a dangerous criminal who mercilessly murdered an innocent woman.”

Malloy noted that this time, however, that Jones passed a polygraph, or “lie detector,” test administered by a former FBI agent. He added that it is the duty of law enforcement not only to protect citizens, but to also see that justice is administered to those who might have been falsely accused and wrongly convicted.

“It’s a long struggle for Mr. Evans,” said Malloy. “Really, all we’re asking for is some sense of decency and a moral question to look into this case. Mr. Jones’ statement and the evidence that is now produced are enough that somebody should look into this case. They should look into it not just for Mr. Evans but for Mrs. Leo. …The truth about how Mrs. Leo died has not been told.”

Chester Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland and Police Commissioner Otis Blair pledged at a similar rally in January to take a look at the potentially exonerating information, but Malloy said he had not heard from Kirkland since.

Kirkland said Monday that he had spoken with Malloy since and sent a letter to the District Attorney’s Office supporting reinvestigation. But it is not up to the police department to reopen the investigation, Kirkland said – only the district attorney can do that.

“We can’t force them to reopen it, but we’ve done our part,” said Kirkland. “We’ve done everything that they’ve asked that we said we were going to do.”

Those who know Evans say he is not bitter about his conviction and Malloy said he was relieved to tears when he heard Jones’ story because he was afraid he would die in prison never really knowing what happened to Leo. Malloy said that he believes it would give her relatives the same relief to find out what truly happened.

Leo’s niece, Teresa Kaiser, is the sole remaining survivor of the victim. She declined comment on the case, but her husband, retired Police Cpl. John Kaiser, said they believe Evans was rightly convicted.

“He admitted to burning the clothes,” said Kaiser. “If you take the clothing off of somebody that was beat to death, you might as well have hit them with the iron yourself and choked them with the clothesline yourself. He did his part. To go to jail for 37 years, I don’t feel sorry for him at all.”

Evans’ supporters say he could not have been involved in the death itself, however, because it was simply not in his character.

“He never, ever would have done anything like that,” said Pearl Moses, one of the “neighborhood cousins” gathered for the rally. “He’s also the young man who ran into a burning house and saved his sister from that fire. He has that type of spirit about him.”

“He could not have done this,” added Yolanda Moses. “(He is) loving and kind, he just did everything and anything that you needed him to. He was the type of person that when an argument began, he was always there to break it up.”

Kaiser said his worst fear is that a judge will reopen the case and his wife will have to experience the violent end of her aunt’s life all over again.

“We think we got the right guy in jail,” he said. “If you look at the evidence, he was complicit in what he did. I understand the family has their feelings for their own family, most people would do that, but we also have feelings, too.”

Kaiser added that Frank Leo, the victim’s husband, never smiled again after his wife was taken from him. Their only son, Frank Jr., drank himself to death, Kaiser said.

“It destroyed her family on that side,” he said. “Once the trial was over, the rest of the family never spoke of Emily again because it was too hard for them to talk about it. … I think that Emily’s death was a root problem of why her husband and her son died. It’s a shame. She worked hard and those two men were the only things in her life that mattered to her.”